Following the Ploughshares Seminar (see below), the three Metro New
Yorkers in the group -- Aaron Alexander, Jackie Steiner, and Bill Bly --
got together on a more or less monthly basis to have dinner and talk about
the writing life. Although we all hated it, we couldn't think of anything
else to call it but the Well Writers Group. In between noshing sessions,
we traded manuscripts, then got on the telephone and gave each other detailed
critiques. The result was that every one of my fiction drafts (except for
the hypertexts) has now had a thorough going-over
-- and boy do I have a lot of work to do! We ran out of manuscripts to
show each other in May, and so are on deep standby for the moment, but
as soon as something worth looking at comes out of the word-processor (or,
in Jackie's case, the manual typewriter!), we'll be back!

In August 1997, I took part in the Ploughshares International Fiction
Writing Seminar (info: dgriffin@emerson.edu),
which was held in a Renaissance castle (with two moats!), Kasteel
Well, on the river Maas (Meuse in France) in southeast Holland, about
20 miles north of Venlo. 36 "students," 6 "faculty," a full complement
of ducks, geese, a crane, a hawk, and some brilliantly colored game birds
(I never found out their name) ran the castle staff ragged for eleven days,
caroused the nights away at a riverside potation establishment, and picked
nits out of each other's fiction by day.